While the basic steps of cheese making have been unchanged for centuries the production process is continuously improving. An important driver is to maintain or improve quality of the end product while rationalizing the process, i.e. a goal common to several applications within the field of food processing.
Adding ingredients to cheese may be done in several manners. Generally the procedure of adding an ingredient involves mixing devices which distribute the ingredients in the curd mass, or complex dosing systems which spread ingredients over a large area or volume of curd. Other methods involves dosing all ingredients at once into a batch of curd and whey, which subsequently is mixed in curd vats or buffer tanks over time to achieve proper distribution. Known methods suffer the drawback of being time consuming in regard of dosing and distribution of ingredients. Also, if the ingredient of a consecutive batch differs from the ingredient used in a present batch the time and effort needed for proper shift-over between ingredients (to prevent drag of ingredients between batches or different types of cheeses as ingredients attach to equipment parts and layers) is considerable. Another cumbersome operation may be the pre-processing of ingredients to achieve right ingredient behaviour after dosing to achieve proper distribution. Such pre-processing may include pre-wetting ingredients to prevent ingredients to float or sediment into a batch of curd and whey.
Further to the drawbacks related to time consumption there is also the issues of product losses. There may be high losses of ingredients due to fouling, where the ingredient is lost to the equipment, or retention to whey (instead of retention to cheese), where the ingredient is drained off when the whey is drained off, and apart from being a poor use of ingredients, the fouling of the whey reduces its value or blocks its normal way of processing to whey based dairy products. Mechanical mixing of curd for the purpose of mixing in ingredients may result is higher amount of curd fines and thus in losses of curd (e.g. curd fines lost to whey) or loss of desired curd properties (e.g. loss of moisture and fat). The introduction of complex or massive machinery to spread ingredients over a large area of curd, or to distribute ingredients throughout a large volume of curd introduces associated costs, yet also fouling areas which require cleaning procedures to properly remove curd remains and ingredient remains during switch of ingredients.
An aim is to eliminate or at least alleviate one or more of these drawbacks. Though being limited to cheese production in its description, the device and methods may be used in other applications where it is desired to add a smaller amount of ingredients or additives to a larger amount of granular product.